Determining and Estimating Wastewater Treatment Operating Costs

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Determining and Estimating Wastewater Treatment
Operating Costs

• Identify your daily, weekly, monthly or
  annual generation of wastewater by several
  methods
• Measurements from instruments, e.g., flow meters,
  identifying a flow rate, usually
  gallons-per-minute (GPM)
• Identifying and itemizing potable water supply,
  for industrial uses, from your local utilitys
  billing statements
• Best estimate from historical operations and / or
  combination of 1 and 2 above

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Determining and Estimating Wastewater Treatment
Operating Costs

• Identify your waste treatment operating
  costs
• Acid, caustic, sulfide, magox, etc. Any and all
  materials or chemicals used solely in waste
  treatment need to be accounted and itemized.
• Additionally, itemize associated costs such as
  hazardous waste disposal, laboratory analysis,
  equipment repair, parts, filters, miscellaneous
  supplies, etc.
• Estimate, if possible, electricity consumption,
  in Kw/Hr., of your waste treatment equipment to
  derive a /KwHr. cost

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Determining and Estimating Wastewater Treatment
Operating Costs

• Benefits
• Derivation of a unit cost, ideally in /gallon,
  representative of your wastewater treatment
  operations and a representative daily flow or
  discharge of wastewater, in gallons/day.
• Establishing a unit cost baseline that can be
  compared to existing wastewater discharge
  standards as a measure of performance /
  compliance.
• An accurate representation of your existing
  wastewater treatment costs that will enable
  refining and optimizing of your systems
  performance.

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Cost Itemization

• Using a spreadsheet program, such as Excel,
  Lotus Notes, etc., will enable you to itemize and
  calculate operating cost data. In the following
  example, calendar year 2000 has been itemized by
  certain categories to identify and generate a
  /gallon cost as well as estimated gallons/day
  discharged. This data will be subsequently used
  to estimate operating costs for MPM compliance.

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Examples of cost itemization
Here you can see how monthly operating costs have
been itemized along with wastewater information,
including gallons per day. Monthly totals were
obtained from daily flowmeter measurements and
multiplied by the days worked. If flow meters
are unavailable, estimates from industrial
water billings can be used as an estimate. To
obtain gallons per day from monthly totals,
simply divide the monthly wastewater total by the
number of days worked in the month.
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Examples of cost itemization
Once you obtain the total monthly operating costs
and the monthly wastewater gallons, divide the
total monthly dollar cost by the monthly gallons
to obtain a /gallon cost. In the example above
for January, 23,912 divided by 1,815,780 gallons
equals a unit cost of 0.0132 / gallon.
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Additional costs itemization and cost assumptions
For purposes of estimating operating costs
increases due to the MPM rule, on the assumption
of recycling wastewater (instead of treatment
discharge), careful identification of wastewater
streams for recycling is paramount. For example,
developer and stripper rinses are ideal
candidates for recycling in that they are dilute
and contain virtually no copper or other metal
constituents. In the example above, capital costs
of the additional microfiltration (MF) treatment
/ recycling system for developer and stripper
rinses have been identified and ammortized over
60 months. This equates to a monthly cost of
7273, which will be later applied to the overall
operating costs. Additionally, monthly flow or
volume of wastewater to be treated needs to be
identified and added to the monthly ammortization
costs for a subtotal cost for this application.
In this case 40 of the monthly total wastewater
flow has been estimated and applied to this
situation. The corresponding operating costs
will later be added to the overall operating
costs to determine the incremental cost of
treatment.
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Additional costs itemization and cost assumptions
In this additional example, batch treatment costs
need to be revised to reflect the incremental
increase in chemicals and materials in response
to the proposed MPM rule. Again, itemize those
elements that are critical and in support of the
batch treatment process. Depending on the
historical performance of your individual batch
treatment system, estimate the increase in
material costs to be applied.
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For example, a 25 cost increase has been
estimated for the batch treatment chemicals and
materials. Consequently, we have taken the
operating costs and applied a 1.25 factor in
order to derive the estimated cost increases. In
order to accurately account for wastewater, we
have subtracted the amount recycled from
developer and stripper rinses with the resulting
number being the anticipated amounts for batch
treatment as a result of the MPM rule.
The total monthly incremental costs are derived
by subtracting the estimated monthly costs, as
stated above, from the original monthly operating
costs. This incremental cost reflects additional
batch treatment in order to comply with the
proposed MPM rule. Diving this incremental cost
by the volume of wastewater to be treated yields
the unit cost (/gallon) for this application.
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Summary
All these /gallon numbers we have derived for
the various components and assumptions from
wastewater treatment operations will be summed to
represent the total operating costs in /gallon.
As you can see, we have itemized and summed the
original operating costs, op costs for the MF
unit and incremental treatment costs, all in
/gallon, to derive an estimated treatment cost
in response to the proposed MPM rule.
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Conclusion
MPM
This is the nitty-gritty of this exercise. We
now have the necessary information to estimate
what the cost of compliance will be for MPM.
The remaining annual volume of wastewater
represents the amount of wastewater requiring
treatment mutiplied by the unit cost and adding
the annual costs for the MF unit yields the
annual operating costs. Comparing this number and
subtracting it from the original operating costs
will derive the incremental cost of compliance
for MPM. You can see that our costs estimates
for MPM compliance more than double the original
or existing operating costs. This type of
information is critical in that the EPA needs to
understand and accept the financial impact this
rule will have on the PCB industry. We urge you
to develop your operating costs estimates in a
similar fashion, with emphasis on operating
costs, i.e., financial impact, for MPM
compliance. Include this information with your
formal comments to EPA they will be MUCH MORE
POWERFUL!
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When and Where To Send Written Comments
EPA must receive comments on the proposal by May
3, 2001. Submit written comments to   By
mail- Mr. Michael Ebner, Office of Water,
Engineering and Analysis Division (4303) U.S.
EPA 1200 Pennsylvania Ave., NW Washington, DC
20460   By hand delivery (includes FedEx and
UPS)- Mr. Michael Ebner U.S. EPA 401 M St., SW,
Room 611 West Tower Washington, DC 20460  
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Thank You!
By email- E-mail to mpm.comments_at_epa.gov Electroni
c comments must be identified by the docket
number W-99-23 and must be submitted as an ASCII,
or WordPerfect 5/6/7/8/9 or Microsoft Word 97
file avoiding the use of special characters and
any form of encryption. EPA also will accept
comments and data on disks in Word Perfect
5/6/7/8/9, Microsoft Word 97 or ASCII file
format. Electronic comments on this notice may be
filed online at some Federal Depository
Libraries. Please submit any references cited in
your comments. EPA requests an original and three
copies of your comments and enclosures (including
references). Commenter who want EPA to
acknowledge receipt of their comments should
enclose a self- addressed, stamped envelope. No
facsimiles (faxes) will be accepted.